IT Bytes

One thing that has impressed me with Vista is the handwriting recognition, mine is truly awful but it still manages to translate my scrawl. So today I decided to test run the voice recognition. The dictating a text document is excellent, but not only is it very good at understand what I’ve said but it also understands a huge range of commands that makes it easy to maintain a document. For example, "replace that" will auto-select the word "that" and then supply you with a set of alternatives or you say the word you want to replace it. But what amazed me was when I dictated a simple letter and signed off as "John Smith". It wrote ‘John smith’. So rather then go through the replace commands I tried "capitalize smith" and it did it! Really good stuff. However, controlling Windows via voice control isn’t as easy. You have to learn to ask for things directly rather than navigate though the start menu. It’s a bit like using the Run menu, so rather than finding WordPad via the menu you simply say "Open WordPad". So it’s very easy for those things you know about or know their name, but it’s tricky when you don’t. I’m sure when you get used to it would be truly great too. So well done Vista, I take my recognition hat off to you.